Creating good quality Dapps and products matches Fund 9 strategic goal #3 about app ecosystem. The challenge setting proposal is well detailed and include proposal examples.

However the range of Dapps is very wide : from DeFi to physical products, and even gaming apps. In previous Catalyst Funds, specific and different challenges have been set for Defi and for Gaming apps for example. Voters would probably be very confused when reading proposal in this challenge, because they would be very various from each other.

The challenge team states in the proposal comment it is aware of the risk of overlapping other challenges but consider that there is a risk of having funds misallocated because they are split between to many categories.

I consider that the risk for Cardano is higher that voters will be confused, and Fund allocation decision making will lose in quality.

I recommend to the challenge team to rephrase and resubmit this proposal with a more specific range of dapps and products, focusing on some of the examples listed.

This challenge is in my opinion the most important one in projects Catalyst. It’s the one for building DApps, building the tools that allow people to create DApps and ultimately, the challenge that is the backbone of development on Cardano. Why it’s important is clear: for the Cardano ecosystem to grow, people need to want to use it; for them to want to use it, cool tools and applications must exist; for these tools and applications to exist, there needs to be funding. The key metrics to measure will be the numbers of users of Cardano DApps, total value locked in these DApps, transaction volumes etc. I think that the above is proof enough that this challenge is very critical to achieving Cardano’s mission (score: 5).

Dapps, Products & Integrations challenge provides great freedom to participants of the challenge to innovate and grow the Cardano ecosystem. Less constraints, a higher budget, great examples of project categories for inspiration. In addition to the flexibility for future participants, this challenge also goes well with the Fund9 Challenge Setting objectives - so a win win for everyone!

This challenge aims to incentivize the creation of apps, digital and physical products, and collaboration with digital services and protocols that can grow the number of users in the Cardano ecosystem. Obviously, this is fully aligned with the Fund8 Challenge Setting Objectives: make substantial contributions to the Cardano ecosystem and accelerate its growth. The authors provide a list of 10 example categories (such as DeFi, marketplaces, physical products, etc.) which gives insights to future proposers helps them to evaluate the alignment of their ideas with the challenges. Given the above, I believe that this challenge has the highest possible alignment with the Fund9 Challenge Setting objectives.

This is a consolidation of several historical challenges, all focused on growing Cardano's ecosystem. Why the consolidation is good: 1) it engages more voters since they need to review fewer challenges. 2) it engages more proposers since the challenge requirements are less restrictive. 3) it ensures that a bigger budget goes to what really matters to users - new products, apps, and integrations.

Many success criteria and metrics are defined for the various types of proposal. I’m convinced that if proposers follow this guidance, then the community will be able to track the progress of proposals in this challenge.

The success criteria for this challenge is very clear and easy to verify. It’s about how many DApps will be built as a result of funding received here, how many users these will attract, how much TVL they will grow to etc (score: 5).

Which metrics are proposed? new applications, products, users, integrations. Can these metrics measure progress in addressing the challenge? Of course! What can better measure the progress of a challenge focused on DApps, Products, and Integrations that exactly the number of applications, products and integrations. All good.

This challenge measures the things that make the most sense for the Cardano ecosystem - new applications and new users - which clearly show the growth of the ecosystem.

The author states that the primary metrics to measure are the attracted users and newly-created viable applications and products. These are specific and measurable metrics, which are perfectly aligned with the Challenge Setting objective of growing the Cardano Ecosystem. In addition, the author provides additional example success metrics to guide the future proposer for each of the 10 example sub-categories of proposals. This provides additional clarity and makes the challenge more verifiable. For the above reasons, I find this proposal to be highly verifiable.